Ironists Abroad

Disillusionment on the Danube in Arthur Phillips's first novel.

The names of Central European cities may not strike you as being all that amusing; still, the wittiest title in recent years could well be the one that Arthur Phillips has given to his début novel, “Prague” (Random House; $24.95). It's not that there's anything inherently sidesplitting about disaffected young expats who wander around Eastern Europe right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is what Phillips's five main characters happen to be. (As the author himself slyly observes, his setup is “not without a powerful whiff of cliché.”) Nor are you likely to consider this particular quintet of innocents abroad—four Americans and one Canadian—very funny: a more grimly self-conscious and hopelessly unself-aware gaggle of twenty-somethings would be hard to find in contemporary fiction, which is saying a lot. It's just that not a single page of “Prague” takes place in Prague. The story is set, instead, entirely in Budapest—that “god-forsaken paprika-stained Austrian test market,” one glum resident dubs it, where would-be artistes and halfhearted corporate vultures from the West have flocked because the wealthier, cleaner, more picturesque Czech city is either too expensive or has already been exploited. “That's where real life is going on right now,” John Price, a journalist and the novel's most introspective character, declares at one point. “Not here.”

But “Prague” is less about place than about time. Or, rather, Time: in this rich meditation on post-ideological ennui, the young Cold War victors don't have real lives because they can't orient themselves properly to what Phillips calls “the rush of History.” Much of the action centers on an ongoing attempt by one of the five principals, a slick Hungarian-American venture capitalist named Charles Gábor, to acquire the Horváth Press, a venerable and newly privatized publishing house once known as “The Memory of Our People.” Like so many Americans, the Ohio-bred child of refugees believes himself to be free of the past; “Prague” makes it clear that such freedom comes at a high moral and cultural price. While Charles first seduces and then, inevitably, abandons the elderly, urbane Imre Horváth—a survivor of two world wars, of Nazis and Communists, but not of triumphant post-Cold War capitalism—his four friends roam around Budapest doing what people in expat novels have always done, which is to sit in cafés, gossip, have affairs, and feel hopelessly cut off from everything. “Why am I unhappy in the era and the place I was given?” Mark Payton, the Canadian, wonders.

Like some other recent big novels with large ambitions, this one has its fair share of narrative sleights-of-hand and postmodern gewgaws. (Not least, a history of Hungary in the form of a series of M.B.A.-exam essay questions.) But what's gratifying about “Prague” is that, beneath the up-to-the-minute cleverness, it's really an old-fashioned novel of ideas—one of those books in which the plot feels like allegory and each character stands for some grand concept. Charles Gábor, of course, functions nicely as a poster boy for the soullessness of American capitalism. Mark, a forlorn gay academic, is the voice of nostalgia; he's even writing a book about it. While everyone else is drinking coffee and getting laid, he's paralyzed by the thought that “a Central European capital in the opening weeks of its post-Communist era” might someday represent “someone's receding, cruelly unattainable golden age.” John Price's brother, Scott, on the other hand, stands for the American dream of starting over: a blond stud, he travels the world putting as much distance as possible between himself and his unhappy childhood as a misfit in an olive-skinned Jewish family. And so on.

And yet Phillips lavishes so much detail on his characters that they are no less textured—no less human—for being so obviously symbolic. This is particularly true of John Price, who reminds us that the flip side of his brother's fantasy of having no past is an anguished yearning for “roots.” When John meets Nádja, an old Hungarian pianist who regales him with stories of Austro-Hungarian spies and daring escapes from Communist thugs, he is so swept up in “the rush of History” that he becomes dangerously clueless about the present. Among other things, he fails to notice that the woman he's mad about—Emily Oliver, the American Ambassador's crisply efficient girl Friday—is a lesbian. Unfortunately, Emily, who's spent her life dutifully following in her military father's footsteps, hasn't noticed, either.

The contrast—with its echoes of James and Wharton and Turgenev—between Eastern worldliness and Western naïveté is one that Phillips knowingly evokes, even as he goes on to toy with it. (Poor Daisy Miller is poisoned by continental sophistication, but when her spiritual descendants go abroad it's Europe that suffers.) This cultural conflict is used to suggest a more complex set of oppositions: between experience and narrative, between the things that happen to us and the stories we invent to explain them. You feel these tensions at play in Mark's obsessive attempt to identify a kind of ur-moment in the history of café-going, a moment before painters went to cafés simply “because that's what painters do“; in the roiling story of the publishing house of Horváth, which functions as an allegory for Hungary's tortured history (for generations, no one has been able to agree whether a famous Horváth ancestor fought for or against the Hapsburg oppressors); and in the Westerners' endless search for something that feels “real” to them. Phillips's expatriates are suffering from a sense of inauthenticity that doesn't seem to afflict their local counterparts; while they roost in cafés, wistfully seeking an echt Central European dining experience, and averting their eyes from the city's contemporary buildings, the Hungarians are enthusiastically lined up outside Budapest's first McDonald's.

Phillips's epigraph, a sardonic quote from Thomas Mann's “Lotte in Weimar,” is about the end of the romantic age of “arms and épopées” and the advent of “a practical era”; despite his clear-eyed and decidedly postmodern consciousness of the dangers of nostalgia, there's little question about which the author of “Prague” prefers. (When John, who writes a column for an expat newspaper, interviews some American marines about what they would fight for, one answer he gets is “You mean, like, what are we paid?”) Charles Gábor has a casually utilitarian—and, Phillips hints, deeply American—understanding of “identity”: the fact that he buffs his Hungarian speech and manners only in order to charm Horváth out of his family business is just one indication of the extent to which the novel is about a conflict between historical morality and post-historical morality. Scott Price's wry wish for a “Master's Degree in Living for the Moment” may remind you how fatuous the naïve American faith in self-invention often is; the epic struggle between Horváth and Charles reminds you how tragic it can be.

These big ideas are conveyed in prose that is studied, even mannered; nonetheless, “Prague” often manages to be very funny. (Being in a crowded night club is “like passing through an animal's close, moist digestive tract, the thumps of the music like the thumps of its amplified, proximate heart.”) And it's filled with the kind of gleeful neologisms—”fratultery,” for a man's affair with his brother's girlfriend—that you'd expect of a five-time “Jeopardy!” champion, which Phillips is. In the end, however, this book leaves you with a pretty bleak picture of the citizenry produced by a culture that lives so determinedly in the present. Charles goes through life wanting to be “extraordinarily . . . something”; the one thing his parents' adopted land hasn't provided is a definition of that something.

Only John, the writer, who's so addicted to Nádja's narratives that he no longer cares if they're true, knows how you get a “real life”—from, that is to say, “history and suffering,” the very things that American culture so energetically defends itself against. In an impassioned article, John writes, “We of the West have been spared certain tests, and there are those who thank God for the . . . apparently permanent commutation of that dreadful trial. But some of us, perhaps, ache for it.” In their different ways, all Phillips's characters ache for something, without ever knowing what it is. The great sadness is that “it”—history and suffering, real life—is staring them in the face the whole time they're in Budapest; they just don't know how to recognize it. Their inability to do so is “Prague” 's final joke—one that's likely to leave you aching, too. ♦